The Fortress at Zanján: Ḥujjat's Defense

Nabíl’s Dawn-Breakers devotes a long chapter to the events at Zanján in 1850. The city, in north-western Persia, had as its principal religious authority a scholar of unusual independence of mind: Mullá Muḥammad-‘Alíy-i-Zanjání, surnamed by his followers and at length by the Báb Himself with the title Ḥujjat, the Proof.

Ḥujjat had been imprisoned twice for his teaching of the Bábí message in his own city. He had been released. The hostility of the local clergy and of the governor, however, mounted through the months of early 1850. The crisis came in the late spring. A confrontation in the streets of Zanján between the Bábís and the local authorities forced a separation of the city itself: one quarter, around the residence of Ḥujjat, took refuge in the fortified compound known as the fortress of ‘Alí-Mardán Khán.

The siege that followed lasted, by Nabíl’s reckoning, more than eight months. It was the longest of the Bábí defensive sieges of the early years.

The forces arrayed against the defenders grew with each month. Detachments of the Imperial army arrived from the provincial centres; artillery was brought up; the surrounding quarters of the city were destroyed by bombardment. The defenders, numbering at first some thousand men, thinned with every assault. Provisions ran short. The water supplies failed.

Nabíl preserves in this chapter one of the great images of the Bábí period: that of the women of the besieged compound. They took, the chronicle records, the clothes of their fallen brothers and husbands; they covered their hair; they took up the rifles laid down by the dead; and they stood the watches beside the men who remained. Hurrying water through the gaps in the wall, they ran the relays of ammunition. Several of them, by name preserved in the chronicle, fell beside the men they had stood with.

Ḥujjat himself was wounded in the closing weeks of the siege. He continued to direct the defense from the room in which he lay. Nabíl preserves his last counsels to the friends who gathered about his bed: that the cause for which they had suffered would, in its appointed hour, become the cause of the world; that the long defense was not a defeat but the seed-bed of a future they themselves would not see; that the Promised One whose coming the Báb had foretold would emerge, in due season, from the sacrifice they were now making.

He died of his wounds before the fortress at length fell. The defenders who survived him were taken prisoner. The standard treatment of Bábí captives followed: the executions were carried out with cruelty, the heads sent to Ṭihrán, the women and children driven into the streets. The Imperial records of the siege boast of a final victory.

Nabíl, who collected the testimony of the few survivors of Zanján who reached Bahá’u’lláh in later years, sees in the ruins of the fortress not the proof of defeat but the foundation of the Cause to come. The walls fell; the testimony of the witnesses did not. Their hearts, set on the love of their Master, kept the wall long after the wall itself was rubble.

Source: Nabíl-i-A'ẓam, The Dawn-Breakers (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1932), Chapters XXIII and XXIV — The Siege of Zanján. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/dawn-breakers/